nytimes.com — Powerset, a company whose aim is to deliver better answers than any other search engine ? including Google ? by letting users type questions in plain English. And they have made believers of Silicon Valley investors whose fortunes turn on identifying the next big thing.
Jan 1, 2007 View in Crawl 4
gawtmilkJan 2, 2007
This was on the front page YESTERDAY for chrissakes!
ninjab3arJan 2, 2007
If somebody wants to defeat Google it will be pretty damn hard. Google's main service is internet search, which is FREE and works PERFECTLY FINE. Unless someone comes up with an incredible new way that redifines internet search, then maybe they'll have a chance, as for now providing a new search engine will not give people enough incentive to stop using google.
Closed AccountJan 2, 2007
I just tried ChaCha.And it's GayGay.
etruscanJan 2, 2007
Ask is actually a pretty good search engine, and is one of the most underrated players in the search game. Their results are consistently better than MSN or Alexa. They may be on-par with Yahoo, though that's debatable. Powerset won't likely make a dent, unless they have some extremely insightful ways to refine problematic search results... or some kind of gimmick like Snap.com's preview. I wish them the best of luck though.
aeooJan 2, 2007
Exactly.Being able to ask a question is total crap.What we need are search engines that allow us to search the way we want to search, as opposed to the way the search engine thinks we should search. I don't want page rank. I don't want Google to decide what I should see. What I want is a search engine that lets me specify very very specific and detailed patterns and conditions. I want to be able to use regular expressions and contextual information for my searches. The more contextual information is exposed to me as a searcher, the better. I am also not happy with searching for plain strings. We need regexp for power searching. I don't care if this doesn't please "the masses", but it needs to be done.